# Grafana

## Placeholder notes

* Source: Getting Started with Grafana: Real-Time Dashboards for IT and Business Operations; by Ronald McCollam; Published by Apress; O'Reilly
* Grafana Cloud website: <https://grafana.com/> | free forever plan, 10K series Prometheus metrics + 50GB logs + 50GB traces
* Docs: <https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/introduction/>
* Playground without needing to login: <https://play.grafana.org/d/000000012/grafana-play-home?orgId=1>
* Grafana visualizes data but doesn’t actually store it. To visualize real data we need to connect Grafana to the data sources where that data resides. Data sources must provide a query interface in order for Grafana to retrieve data. The internal format Grafana uses to represent data is called a data frame, which is based on the Apache Arrow project. There’s more information about it in the Grafana developer documentation at <https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/developers/plugins/data-frames/>. You don’t need to know anything about data frames unless you want to build a new data source plugin yourself
* Grafana supports several types of data sources:
  * Time series databases: InfluxDB, Prometheus, Graphite
  * Relational databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL
  * Logs: Loki, Elasticsearch
* Sample data that is provided by a special built-in data source that generates random numbers: Testdata DB data source is as simple as it gets
* It’s often the case that data is stored in UTC but that you are viewing the data in another time zone entirely. Grafana tries to show you data in your local time zone
* Grafana Labs provides releases of Grafana built for ARM architectures running Linux, which suits the Raspberry Pi perfectly
* One way that Grafana stays self-contained is by shipping with a lightweight file-based database called SQLite
*

## Raw vs Visual Design

<figure><img src="https://2465873502-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-prod.appspot.com/o/spaces%2FZtCzylwuWdzj4grYr08M%2Fuploads%2FKMzbUbmtG6rZuoMExXDl%2Fimage.png?alt=media&#x26;token=037eec9f-01a4-4c26-9eaf-12e1b72c8775" alt=""><figcaption><p>Raw</p></figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="https://2465873502-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-prod.appspot.com/o/spaces%2FZtCzylwuWdzj4grYr08M%2Fuploads%2FuaMemacLTjOLbvVz30SS%2Fimage.png?alt=media&#x26;token=ce4c5857-8278-490b-9791-c238409e5948" alt=""><figcaption><p>Visual Design</p></figcaption></figure>
